“If that choosing of aggression for sex truly is a sexual orientation on the scale that it’s occurred in history and is still occurring, we are totally, totally, totally screwed as a species in terms of the future. The suffering will only increase.”

The First Rule Of Life is: Never let reality depress you. It’s the only reality you’ll ever have.

The Second Rule Of Life is: Never let people’s actions depress you. They’re the only people there are.

THIS is what it is; better to know it so you can deal effectively with it and thereby move reality just *that* much more towards the light by making use of what opportunities you were given or can find.

The only alternative to this is to hate people and what they are and to hate reality, which makes you a misanthrope. This leads directly to Hitler.

Seriously, at the core, yes you’ve identified the fuel that fuels the fire. For sure, I agree with you. OTOH, all is not lost. In the future, in the near far future, say 200-300 years, we’ll have the knowledge we need to remake human kind into something more kindly. In fact, long term, that is humanity’s destiny however little that may go down with present day humans.

It was Einstein who said (uh, about) “the bomb has changed everything but our thinking”. He might as well have said “we’ve understood and mastered everything but ourselves.”

You can’t choose what time in history and what the level of development of society and science will be in the time you live. If you have any accuracy to your historical imagination, you realize you we’re fortunate enough to be living in one of the most desirable times ever, and certainly the most desirable time excluding say certain brief arrangements for certain classes of people which occurred in the past 200 years. It’s better to be just well off, or even middle class, than any given Pharaoh of Egypt, for instance.

But we weren’t born into the future, when things are even better. That’s our lot. And why will things be even better? Because science progresses and drags human society, kicking and screaming, with it. Because in the future no one will feel like murdering and plundering. Because in the future the extremes of envy, of spitefulness of disconnectedness of the seven deadly sins and perhaps even a few more beyond those, will be rounded off the human character via genetic engineering. Because in the future, everyone will be gorgeous, and have great teeth.

And those people will look back at our prodigious video and picture output and say “Wow. People were so funny looking back then.” and “Wow, how could human beings even bring themselves to DO that to each other?”.

So your mind struck on a presently unaddressable problem and fell into despair. Don’ t stay too long there. Remember that everything you count as good, and every happy moment any human being has ever spent has been realized and spent in a world probably less good than the one you occupy, and by a long shot less good.

We’re here with the good lives and hopes we might have today because our ancestors kept swinging. Your desire to survive, to see the species survive, to see the world remade into something more humane is joined by an unbroken chain of people extending all the way back into pre-cvilization who just kept going. This is one, long, intergenerational group effort towards a goal, the only goal there is or has ever been, and are you going to be the generation that lays down that burden and just gives up? Really? Really?

One thing you are already blessed with that past generations could not lift themselves with is the certain knowledge that there’s a cure. for what ails us. We can’t implement that cure today, but just knowing that such a thing can exist is revolutionary. Thoughtful and sensitive members of previous generations had indeed to resign themselves to the thought that we’re just perma-fucked. You get to know that we’re not.

All we have to do is survive another 300 years and people just like us will live the lives we wish we had. I’ve always considered this a type of immortality myself. That future softwarevisualization is not just a lot like me, he is me, albeit wiped clean, started over, rebooted, alive, well and equal to the day before him. Tally ho!

But all this is predicated on us surviving. And then one thinks of the Koch brothers and one realizes that the war for this fragile thing we call civilization against those people and forces who would destroy it is not over. Not by a long shot.

I edited my last post to respond to the repeated assertation that what I’m proposing is actually child abuse.

I realized that I actually do have the space in this thread to explain why men shouldn’t approach women. First it was just an anecdotal observation growing up that I saw reflected not only in my school experience but in all the school experiences I observed besides mine and also through conversations I have with all sorts of people throughout life. What I noticed was that the kindest males did not ask women out. I then noticed, that women tended not to ask them out. I then noticed that the kindest women were being asked out by males. I realized just from this alone that women were more attracted to aggression sexually than men were, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the nicest men weren’t asking women out. I noticed that basically the more agressive males tended to have about 20 to 30 women partners by graduating high school and the least aggressive tended to have 1 or none regardless of how smart or attractive they were. Then I read the study.

The one where strangers were approaching strangers with various sexual advancing questions. The first question was simply to go out on a date. 50% of women said yes to these male strangers and 50% of the men said yes to the female strangers. But then the question was changed, it was something like “Will you have sex with me right now?” 0% of the women said yes. Read: none of them said yes. 75% percent of the men said “Yes”. 75%! 0%! Fascinating. Not only did the women say no, they were quite biligerantly angry about it…. Men and women have the exact opposite reaction to this question when approached by a stranger.

What I figured out from this is that when men ask women out on dates (the first question) they are much more likely than women are when women are asking men out on dates to really be asking the woman if she wants sex. When a woman asks a man out on a date she is much less likely to actually be encoding the question “Will you have sex with me right now?” than a man is. What I realized, is that the fact that women don’t respond to the question of being asked out on a date by a male with the same ferocity as being asked for sex actually again suggests that women are more attracted to aggression as an aggregate. What this means is that if you are a male, simply because of the culture, it is actually more aggressive to ask women out on a date than it is to not ask them out on a date. This will not change until the numbers are equal with respect to the question of being asked for sex by a stranger of the opposite gender.

“If that choosing of aggression for sex truly is a sexual orientation on the scale that it’s occurred in history and is still occurring, we are totally, totally, totally screwed as a species in terms of the future. The suffering will only increase.”

The First Rule Of Life is: Never let reality depress you. It’s the only reality you’ll ever have.

The Second Rule Of Life is: Never let people’s actions depress you. They’re the only people there are.

Seriously, at the core, yes you’ve identified the fuel that fuels the fire. For sure, I agree with you. OTOH, all is not lost. In the future, in the near far future, say 200-300 years, we’ll have the knowledge we need to remake human kind into something more kindly. In fact, long term, that is humanity’s destiny however little that may go down with present day humans.

People who delight in others misfortune should be depressed about who they are.
How exactly are we going to make the decision to depopulate what may become 10+ billion people and start making all the kids as bio-engineered. This is your utopia? How are you going to get everyone to obey your system and only reproduce through a lab. You’d have to sterilize every single male on earth to accomplish this. Sex will still be a reward system even if none of the people are sexually reproduced, and the way it’s distributed will still largely influence our social structure. I’m not a depopulationist, and I have to be straight with you, what you’re talking about is a depopulation scheme. How exactly do you propose we kill off all the mean people and leave only the kindest ones standing, do you think there’s a disease that will do this? Do you think we can survey everyone and section people off for survival and death?

People who delight in others misfortune should be depressed about who they are.

You misunderstood what I said. Go back and read it more carefully.

How exactly are we going to make the decision to depopulate what may become 10+ billion people and start making all the kids as bio-engineered.

This is your utopia? How are you going to get everyone to obey your system and only reproduce through a lab.

Your problem here is you think I said something I neither said nor implied. You think you heard me say that people have to reproduce through a lab. I didn’t say that and nothing I said implies that.

The reason you think I said that or what I said implies it is because you don’t know anything about gene therapy , what it can do, what it will be able to do, how it is delivered, and why people would want it. In other words, you’re ignorant on this topic.

Same thing with the nature of sexual attraction and sexual behaviour. Somehow, you think you’re the first person to consider these things and therefore your thoughts are insightful, groundbreaking and of interest to other people, when in fact a lot of smart people have thought on the same topic, and in fact dedicated their lives to really understanding these things. If you want to have theories that aren’t laughably naive, you have to learn what others before you have discovered. You’re omitting that part.

You’d have to sterilize every single male on earth to accomplish this.

To tell you the truth I don’t even know your reasoning behind this, nor do I want to.

Sex will still be a reward system even if none of the people are sexually reproduced, and the way it’s distributed will still largely influence our social structure. I’m not a depopulationist, and I have to be straight with you, what you’re talking about is a depopulation scheme.

No don’t bother explaining this total non-sequitor either. Your replies are so far afield from anything I took pains to make clear, and in a nice way too, that I just don’t care. where this came from, what you’re reasoning is or how you came to this conclusion.

How exactly do you propose we kill off all the mean people and leave only the kindest ones standing, do you think there’s a disease that will do this? Do you think we can survey everyone and section people off for survival and death?

Yeah that last one pretty wraps this up for me. Here’s my observation- you’re only interested in your own thoughts and not with learning. You should talk less and read more. The list I gave you would be a good place to start.

So you’re saying gene therapy can be administered while the person is already alive? Say, to a 50 year old woman? I was assuming that it was about constructing the human from the ground up, like the zygote or something. If you understand it from that vantage point, everything I said makes sense. I see where you’re going with this. You might actually be right. I still disagree with you that this is not something that can’t be addressed with early education. These decisions may or may not be as strong as a sexual orientation. Like I said earlier, they may be as simple as warning someone about condom use, and because it feels better lots of people don’t like using condoms, but with education they are more likely to use them. Does that make sense?

As for misunderstanding what you said? I didn’t misunderstand. You said to never be depressed about anything and you used the entire population set, self included. I checking the statements as axioms I decided that a person should be depressed if they delight in the misfortunes of others and rejected your statements as the axioms they were presented as.

I just saw a “consensual sex” sticker for the second time in my life… this time on a coffee mug. Non-consensual sex is always bad, but actually most consensual sex is not good either. When it comes to humans, you can hold the aggression in the palm of your hand like a globe, the globe of the world, and understand something very simple about humanity. When I said earlier that the most aggressive males receive more sexual selections than the least aggressive males, a difference of about 30 by high school graduation. If these numbers are reversed, you will see eventual world peace. It truly is that simple. I don’t believe that we have to wait until gene therapy to make a difference on this issue, I really think early education on this topic will make a significant difference.

OK I’ll smoke the peace pipe. I have enjoyed our conversation and look forward to future discussions with us both as participants.

However, i take extraordinary exception to one thing you said especially:

You said:

Non-consensual sex is always bad, but actually most consensual sex is not good either.

Excuse me but the girls and guys in my dorm at university had a saying about this. Sex is like pizza. When it’s good, it’s good. When it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

Carry on !

From an ethical standpoint. Consensual sex can even be pleasurable, but from an ethical standpoint it can have severe reprocussions on society depending on whether the persons chosen were less aggressive than other people in the field or not.
If they are more aggressive than other people in the field, congratulations, you just rewarded asshole, good luck feeding people in third world countries, oh and if you’re not feeling good enough about yourself yet, you can also congratulate yourself on all the rapes too. If you chose the least aggressive person, congratulations, you just properly used a reward system and have reenforced kindness in the species as a whole.

The billions of sexual selections that are occurring every day are literally determining the fabric of our global social structure. While I think all rapists should be sent to prison for it, people do need to understand that when men pick more aggressive women over less aggressive women this will feed female rape perpetrators when women pick more aggressive men over less aggressive men this will feed male rape perpetrators. Women as an aggregate choose more aggressive behaviors in men then men do in women which is why there are so many more male rapists than female rapists. So yes, these sexual selection decisions are reenforcing the mentality of rape, that more aggressive behaviors sexually are getting rewarded over less aggressive behaviors sexually, and the most aggressive sexual acts are rape and choosing someone meaner than someone else to have sex with. They are intricately linked together. It also affects aggression in a wide sense, physical and psychological.

I didn’t mention ethics around prostitution. As long as the people being screened are not aggressive people and didn’t acquire their resources through aggression and the transactions are consensual, prostitution is OK so long as the orientation of the prostitute has it such that they don’t feel poorly about themselves as well (some people aren’t well suited to having multiple partners).

I also have an additional theory. The theory is that our decisions effect our epigenetic structure which has a feedback upon our genetic structure. When people choose less aggressive mates they will on average have less aggressive children, not only will this effect our culture in profound ways if this is taught earlier, and on this point I disagree with softwarevisualization, because I think people will make more informed and better decisions about who they sexually select, it will also begin to reduce the aggression in the offspring as well. Cultural and genetic pressure simultaneously feeding back on each other.

I suppose one more post on this thread would probably wrap it up unless someone else has something they want to add to it conceptually. I said this elsewhere to some extent on this board but I think it belongs here with greater clarification. The best rule in existence is “Do that which elicits the most joy and least suffering for all beings.” Because of how things are here, the best rule to abide by this first rule is, “Don’t have sex with mean people.” One thing that’s interesting about this second rule is that obeying it reduces the most aggregate aggression in the species both because of the behaviorism and the biological evolution, what’s interesting about that, is if you look over all the religions, not a single one of these “divinely inspired” religions has this rule. Not one. Think about all the suffering that could have been prevented if an ethical creator God were guiding humans from their beginnings by having all cultures at least emerge with this rule, since I tend to disagree with software visualization that education won’t matter, I think if cultures did emerge with this rule that

a.) None of us would have been born
b.) Human civilization would be much more peaceful

Another thing that’s interesting about this rule, is that because people in being interested in obeying it for the practical benefits would also spend alot of time thinking to themselves, “What is mean behavior?” This is an excellent meditation for anyone, and the sexual selection provides good reasons for trying to understand why you should choose or be chosen over someone else, to actually create a competition to be a good philosopher and a beneficial follower of that philosophy. I think when people can name stuff they can begin to work with their minds around it, and alot is being named here.

I suppose one more post on this thread would probably wrap it up unless someone else has something they want to add to it conceptually. I said this elsewhere to some extent on this board but I think it belongs here with greater clarification. The best rule in existence is “Do that which elicits the most joy and least suffering for all beings.” Because of how things are here, the best rule to abide by this first rule is, “Don’t have sex with mean people.” One thing that’s interesting about this second rule is that obeying it reduces the most aggregate aggression in the species both because of the behaviorism and the biological evolution, what’s interesting about that, is if you look over all the religions, not a single one of these “divinely inspired” religions has this rule. Not one. . . .

You’re probably right, username, about religions lacking specified rules about mate selection and meanness. But societies in general tend to appreciate mean people being punished and nice people having sex.

Do you have a plan to implement your goal?

One problem with your theory is that plenty of mean people are entirely able to morph into nice people whenever they find it useful to be nice. If your theory were somehow implemented somewhere, psychopaths (1 or 2% of any given population) would be able to impregnate more women than ever because psychopaths appear to be the nicest people you’ve ever met. Have you ever met one? I’ll bet you have, and I’ll bet you thought, “What a nice person. Truly nice, isn’t he?”

You could bypass this problem if you could manage to make it a punishable offense for a man to lie to a woman in order to have sex with her.

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Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundations either. It leaves everything as it is.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

You’re probably right, username, about religions lacking specified rules about mate selection and meanness. But societies in general tend to appreciate mean people being punished and nice people having sex.

Do you have a plan to implement your goal?

One problem with your theory is that plenty of mean people are entirely able to morph into nice people whenever they find it useful to be nice. If your theory were somehow implemented somewhere, psychopaths (1 or 2% of any given population) would be able to impregnate more women than ever because psychopaths appear to be the nicest people you’ve ever met. Have you ever met one? I’ll bet you have, and I’ll bet you thought, “What a nice person. Truly nice, isn’t he?”

You could bypass this problem if you could manage to make it a punishable offense for a man to lie to a woman in order to have sex with her.

The plan is early education on what aggression actually is and education about the impact of sexually selecting it over non aggression. If you really wanted a parity in the law with respect to offenses, women who chose more aggressive mates over less aggressive mates would be imprisoned just like rapists are imprisoned as this particular gender bias is having the largest impact, even though it is also important than men make similar decisions. But that’s not very practical, even though it has just as big a negative impact on society, if not a bigger negative impact on society. I’m definitely for a moderate approach with respect to this particular crime to the idea of teaching and letting people make informed decisions and let social pressure do the rest.

I’m not an expert profiler on psychopathy specifically so I really don’t have a comment about this. I’m sure with a little research I could become one. My initial guess is that there are a lot of dimensions to psychopathy and not all of them are bad people, I do however have a very keen aggression radar when it comes to clothing, material possessions and language.

Lying to get laid is certainly a problem that people encounter, a person who is polysexual may find it advantageous for a particular person to suggest that they are monosexual, they get the sex and then sleep with others as well. I think just helping people to understand that being honest with ones self and others about the issues we encounter in life leads to a more perceptive population about the nature of reality and will conversely allow people to identify problems and solutions much more readily could provide sufficient motivation to accept such a path for ones self.

. . . I’m not an expert profiler on psychopathy specifically so I really don’t have a comment about this. I’m sure with a little research I could become one. My initial guess is that there are a lot of dimensions to psychopathy and not all of them are bad people, . . .

Psychologists don’t usually refer to individuals as being bad or good. They do, however, define psychopathy as being very bad indeed, to use your term. In other words, if you’re not a bad person (your term, not mine), you are not by definition a psychopath. But again, you’re using certain words that are more or less incoherent to psychologists.

By the way, if you’re a wealthy person, username, you could hire a team of attorneys to sue some rich womanizer who tends to use similar lying patterns from one victim to the next. Through the efforts of your legal team and lots of testimony from the women, you could portray the man as being a sex offender deserving of prosecution. No DA would take on the case of course, but your team might be able to get a fat judgement out of the rich womanizer, thereby setting a precedent of some sort. (It wouldn’t make sense to sue someone who doesn’t have money.) But I’m out of my league when it comes to legal matters, so please don’t take my word for it.

Signature

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundations either. It leaves everything as it is.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

. . . I’m not an expert profiler on psychopathy specifically so I really don’t have a comment about this. I’m sure with a little research I could become one. My initial guess is that there are a lot of dimensions to psychopathy and not all of them are bad people, . . .

Psychologists don’t usually refer to individuals as being bad or good. They do, however, define psychopathy as being very bad indeed, to use your term. In other words, if you’re not a bad person (your term, not mine), you are not by definition a psychopath. But again, you’re using certain words that are more or less incoherent to psychologists.

By the way, if you’re a wealthy person, username, you could hire a team of attorneys to sue some rich womanizer who tends to use similar lying patterns from one victim to the next. Through the efforts of your legal team and lots of testimony from the women, you could portray the man as being a sex offender deserving of prosecution. No DA would take on the case of course, but your team might be able to get a fat judgement out of the rich womanizer, thereby setting a precedent of some sort. (It wouldn’t make sense to sue someone who doesn’t have money.) But I’m out of my league when it comes to legal matters, so please don’t take my word for it.

Well, I’d define a bad person as a person who is chronically aggressive towards others. I suppose I see your point though. I read up on psychopathy on wikipedia and saw a lot of that criteria and realized that they are used effectively to reduce aggression as well as add to it, so I’m not quite sure it’s so black and white. I’m thinking a person can function well non-aggressively in society and have many of these traits.

You’re really trying to imagine many scenarios here. I think early education on this stuff can help a lot. It may be interesting to sue people who misrepresent themselves, unfortunately, people can be ignorant of their own sexual orientations and not understand why they can’t keep just one partner. That would be like suing someone who figured out that they’re not actually the right sexual orientation for your gender. Not everyone figures this stuff out right away. You may be able to make a case of misrepresentation for repeated admissions of being monosexual over many serial relationships where it never actually turned out to be true, and that they were lying about their sexual orientation to con the sex. In this instance, I suppose it’d be a class action suit. It may be able to be filed under some kind of fraud laws. But I don’t know much about the legal system either. I personally wouldn’t be interested in pursuing such a matter, but perhaps someone else would be.